Part 29

Slater says in his Directory for 1882 that “Town Yetholm and Kirk Yetholm are both very humble in appearance, especially the latter, which is chiefly inhabited by gipsies, a race formerly remarkable for their disorderly lives and dangerous characters, and at this day distinguished by peculiarity of habits from the general body of the community.”

Dr. Baird says in his “Memoir of the Rev. John Baird,” written some twenty years ago, “A colony of gipsies which had long been settled at Kirk Yetholm had given rather an unenviable notoriety to the village, and rendered its name familiar to thousands in Scotland. The great majority of this wandering race were little better than heathens though born in a Christian land, and were notorious for poaching, thieving, and blackguardism.”

Most of the gipsy dwellings belong to a friend, the Marquis of Tweeddale, and he has of late years taken steps to improve their appearance. At the present time I am told the gipsy dwellings, so far as the outsides are concerned, show a great improvement. Sad to relate, the gipsy tenants have not improved one jot. Landlords may make gipsies’ and labourers’ houses—and it is right they should—healthy and habitable, but estate agents cannot purify the moral iniquity that dwells within. The schoolmaster, law, and the gospel are the agents for this reforming work.

I was told by Mr. Laidlaw that a gipsy named Mathew Blythe was the most respectable gipsy in Yetholm, and would give me any information; so to Mathew I made my way. I knocked at his door and was met with a shout—“Come in.” I did not stand knocking twice after this invitation, and went through the dingy, greasy passage—or “entrance hall”—to another door, which I opened, and there found a round-faced, grey-haired, good-looking, cobbling gipsy at work upon his “last.” The room seemed to serve for kitchen, scullery, parlour, dining-room, sitting-room, bedroom, closet, and workshop. For a minute or two he eyed me over from head to foot before asking me to sit down on a rickety old chair that stood by my side. I told him that I was come to look up the gipsies at Yetholm. I was met with a gruff reply, “There are no gipsies at Yetholm; they are all gone away, and I don’t know where they are gone to.” I said, “I am sorry for that, as I had brought some books, oranges, tobacco, pictures, and coppers for them.” And after a few words in Romany the old man turned up his face with a smile and said, “Well, to speak the truth, I am a gipsy, but my old woman is not. Sit you down.” I sat down and began my tale, and told him who I was and all about the object of my visit. At this the old man opened his eyes wider and wider and said, “Lord, bless you, me and my brother, who lives at Town Yetholm, were only talking about you yesterday, and saying how glad we should be to see you. Let’s shake hands.” He took hold of my hand and gave it a good grip and a squeeze, one that I shall not soon forget. I said, “I suppose you wanted to see me in order to give me a ‘good tanning,’ or else to make the place warm for me; for I have been told by a backwood gipsy writer at — that the gipsies in Scotland would make it hot for me if they once got hold of me; and this is one, among the many other reasons, why I am here to-day.” “Those,” said Mr. Blythe, “who told you that tale told you a lie. I don’t know any gipsy who would hurt your little finger. You have said some hard things about us, but they are true, or nearly so. Why should not our children be educated like other people’s children? Why should gipsy children not be allowed to sit on the same bench with the rest? They are the same flesh and blood, and God looks upon them the same as He does upon other children. In church and in school no one will come near to us, and what is the result? Why, there is not a gipsy in all the place—and there are between one and two hundred—except myself who goes to church on Sundays. The gipsies in Yetholm are worse off to-day than they ever were. Some are in receipt of parish relief.” This upsets the romantic tales of the gipsy writers who maintain that gipsies never receive parish relief. “A few of the children can read and write, but that is all. I learned to read and write a many years, thank God, and I also learnt to make and mend shoes.” I said, “What do the gipsies do and where do they wander, as they grow up?” “They,” said Mr. Blythe, “generally goes to town, or travels the country, and nobody knows where they end their days.” Mr. Blythe was some distant—“ninety-second cousin”—relation to the notorious dare-devil gipsy, Will Faa, who claimed to be a sort of a gipsy king, and on this account I wanted to have a few words about the gipsy kings of Scotland. “Well,” said Mr. Blythe, “you know better than I can tell you that there are no such beings as gipsy kings and queens. It is all bosh and nonsense, conjured up to get money on the cheap. The woman they call the gipsy queen does not live at Yetholm now, she has gone to live at Kelso. I could not tell you whereabouts she lives, but in some of the back streets.”

Mr. Blythe began to relate some of the gipsy tales; and how many kings’ lives the gipsies had saved, and a number of other things relating to gipsy life, into which I had not time to enter, as I wanted to be on the road again with my gigman before it was dark. The old man’s crippled foot prevented him making some visits with me to the other gipsies in the village, or, as he said, “I should have been only too glad to have done so. The poor things want somebody looking after them, I can assure you.” I emptied nearly the whole of the contents of my bags of books, pictures, tobacco, oranges, and a few coppers upon the gipsy cobbler’s bench, among the awls, nails, waxed-ends, &c., for him to distribute, as a _man_, among the gipsy children and old women in the village; and as a _man_, and with gipsy greetings and good wishes, trusting to Mr. Blythe’s honour, I left them, and they have, with God’s blessing, no doubt been distributed. After a few words of cheer and consolation and several shakes of the hands, which somehow brought out my weakness in tears, I bade Mr. Blythe, the grey-haired, open-faced gipsy, “good-bye,” maybe never to meet again on this side of Jordan. I felt as I stepped out of the door that I could have said with a blind writer in the _Church of England Magazine_—

“Though dark and dreary be my way, Thy light can turn my night to day.”

“Pensive I tread my sad and lonely road, Pain, gloom, and sorrow marked me for their prey.”

I took a stroll through the place to eye the gipsy dwellings over, and by the time I had got to the bridge homeward, a number of poor half-starved gipsy children had gathered round me. I had not gone far before I met some bigger gipsies “working _home_” for the night. I thought I would have five minutes’ chat in the snow with a little old gipsy woman named Sanderson, who had accosted me in the usual gipsy fashion, viz., a curtsy and “Your honour, sir.” I pulled up and deposited my bags in the snow. At this the old woman began to smile; she no doubt thought that she had succeeded in her first step to draw something from me. She was not long in perceiving that I was not a Scotchman, and took pains to tell me her name, and that she was an English gipsy from the neighbourhood of Newcastle. It occurred to me that I would just for once try the old woman’s volubility of thanks, and accordingly I dipped into my bag for an orange; this brought the old woman almost upon her knees with a “Thank yer honour;” each “thanks” was accompanied by low curtsies. I next pulled out a picture card; this she put to her breast and said, “Lord bless yer honour.” I gave her another card, for which she responded with upturned eyes, “May the Lord bless you, my dear good gentleman.” I next gave her some coppers; she again turned up her eyes toward heaven and said with a smile, “May you never want a friend in the world.” I next gave her some tobacco, to which she responded, “May the dear Lord thank you a thousand times.” I ran through all the varieties I had, without exhausting her stock of thanks. I began to think that I must “give it up.” I believe Nisbets, Sunday School Union, Hodder and Stoughton, Partridge, Religious Tract Society, Christian Knowledge Society, and all the wide world-known first class publishing houses in Paternoster Row—and over London there are many of them—would not produce variety of picture books enough to exhaust the different kind of thanks the old gipsy woman had in store; at any rate she would have a curtsy for the last and one to spare for the next gift. I had a Testament in my bag, and as a last present I thought I would give it to her. The old woman took it out of my hand as a hungry starving child takes a piece of bread, with more eagerness than she had shown over either the money or the tobacco, and clasped it to her breast and called out with tears in her eyes in an attitude of prayer, “May the dear Lord Jesus bless you, my dear good gentleman, so long as you shall live, and may you never want a friend.” Tears and curtsies came again pretty freely, I shook hands with the old gipsy, and we parted. The rimy moisture on my spectacles, and the hastiness of my movements prevented me testing the old gipsy woman’s tears, to see whether they were genuine or not. I rather think they were; at any rate it is more pleasant to human nature to have smiles than frowns, even if they come from the devil.

I jumped into the trap, put on a warm muffler, and jolted and jogged for some two hours to my lodgings, passing some gipsy poachers on the way, and watching the growing moon in the heavens facing me, which seemed to speak words of consolation showing unmistakably that all was not darkness in the temporary Arctic cold regions in the world of gipsydom.

In Kelso I found out that one of the _princes_ of gipsydom had been in jail nearly a score of times; in fact, one of the magistrates told me that he himself had sent one of the gipsy vagabonds to jail something like half a dozen times during the last two years. As a rule, when his “_highness_” was not in jail, he was employed scraping the streets, scavenging, or getting a penny in other ways. In the train I was told that one of the _queens_ of gipsydom indulged in language which would not be a sufficient passport to heaven, and was at the present time to outside observers a poor, miserable old woman, with one foot in the grave, a standing lie to the advantages, blessings, and beauties of an uncivilized, demoralizing, wandering vagabond’s life.

[Picture: Esther Faa Blythe—a Scotch gipsy queen]

A portrait of one of the self-crowned Scottish gipsy queens, Esther Faa Blythe, is here given. The old woman is eighty-five years of age, and has an eye to business. She is sharp, and can adapt herself to all circumstances. With the saints she becomes heavenly, and so on, almost through the whole of the lights, shades, and phases of social life.

There are numbers of “gipsy kings” and “queens” in the country—aye, almost in every county; at any rate those who are simple enough to believe in them say so. One gipsy queen not long ago used to dress in dashing, gaudy silks, and sit in “a chair of state” in her van, and the Londoners paid their threepennies to see her from time to time. She now lives a “retired life,” upon her gains, at Maidenhead.

The best gipsy queen I know of is the good Christian woman, Mrs. Simpson—formerly a Lee—at Notting Hill, who has become a devoted, good Christian woman, and tries to do all the good she can as she passes up and down the world. Her Bible contains her “state records,” which are the guide of her life. For twenty years she did a “roaring trade” by telling fortunes to simpletons and big babies out of the Bible—upside-down at times—of which she could not tell a letter. Since she has been a _gipsy Christian queen_ she has learnt to read some parts of the blessed book. My plan, if followed out thoroughly in all its details, will make all our gipsies “kings” and “queens.” It is surprising that there are people in the world silly enough even at this late day to believe in such beings as the “gipsy kings” and “queens” of backwood romance.

To come back to Yetholm. The aches, pains, and wild visions of the night carried me almost over the wide, wide world, and had it not been for the power of Divine love and the rays of heavenly light I cannot tell where I might have got to ere this.

“The rougher the way, the shorter the stay,”

said Wesley. I paid my bill, and started homeward, and at St. Boswell’s station I made the acquaintance of Thomas Webster, Esq., and his two sweet, interesting little sons, Masters Thomas Scott Cliff and Harold Colin, of Oxenden Towers, Dunse. In the train we sat together, and chatted and whiled away time almost imperceptibly for several hours as we journeyed southward. At Hillfield we separated. He and his sons travelled westward, and I kept speeding along southward and homeward, I think a wiser man; certainly I know more of the gipsies in Scotland and at Yetholm than I ever knew before. I find, among other things, that there are a number of gipsies living among the rocks on the northern coasts of Scotland, more like wild animals than human beings, and as shaggy as winter-coated goats.

My visit to Yetholm brought out the fact more vividly to my mind than ever, that private flickering and fluttering missionary enterprise, apart from compulsory education, sanitation, and proper Government supervision, is powerless, and unable to reclaim our gipsies and their children from heathendom and its black midnight surroundings; and this I have stated all along in my letters, Congress papers, articles in the _Graphic_ and _Wesleyan Methodist Magazine_, and in my “Gipsy Life,” &c. The case of the poor brickyard girls and boys and canal children proves this in an unmistakable manner beyond all doubt; at any rate, to those who have their eyes and ears open, and hearts and hands ready to help forward the country’s welfare. {329}

Some fifty years ago the Rev. John Baird, a godly minister at Yetholm, and a few warm hearted friends, commenced in right good earnest to reform the gipsies at Yetholm. A committee was formed, several hundreds of pounds were collected, steps taken to get the gipsy children to school, and for some years they issued encouraging reports concerning the gipsies. Plenty of proofs were forthcoming to show that the gipsy children could be made meet for heaven by the application of the laws of education, sanitation, and the gospel; they were, as a rule, as well conducted in school and church as other labouring-class children. In course of time the missionary zeal of the committee began to flag, and Mr. Baird handed them over to the magistrates, and he goes on to say: “Take the more respectable individual, and let him follow the occupation of the gipsy, and in a few years he will in all probability be as bad as any of them. It is almost folly and ignorance to say that a wandering gipsy may be a respectable character. The thing seems to be possible and, theoretically, not improbable; but practically the wandering gipsy is almost without exception a disreputable person. His wandering life leads to innumerable evils. In kindness to themselves, therefore, their occupation, were it even a useful one to society, should be put down; but it is not only useless, but positively injurious to themselves and others. Their life is one of petty crime; their death involved in all the gloom of ignorance and despair.”

What are the results to-day of the years of toil and the hundreds of pounds which have been spent upon the gipsy children at Yetholm? Only one gipsy is to be found going to church on Sundays. And whose fault is it? Certainly not the gipsy children’s, nor yet that of Mr. Baird and his friends, but that of the State and the country. Mr. Baird gave proof that education had made some gipsy children into useful servants and good citizens; and why not more? Would to God that our noble Queen, our statesmen, and our philanthropists would listen to the gipsy children’s cry which has been going upward to heaven from our doors during the last three hundred and sixty-eight years, and is still unheard and unheeded by the Christians of England. Their tears, instead of softening our hearts, have turned them into icicles, sneers, and frozen sympathies, and the devilish, sensual gipsy novelists have transformed the bright lively looks of the girls into wicked designs and immoral purposes. Every retarding act and backward movement of those who would keep the poor gipsy children in ignorance will be a thorn in their pillow at the close of life, as the crest of the eternal wave appears in view with savage, bewildering reality. It is a serious thing to drag women and children downhill, and it is one that will not be banished by the artistic touches of dark, sensual, misleading gipsy romance, however finely drawn and dexterously spun.

The Yetholm gipsies, living, roosting, and nestling in their degrading, demoralizing, and squalid manner, have, during the last three centuries, from beneath the shadow of the sacred parish church and within the sound of its heavenly chimes, sent forth into England, Scotland, and the world over two thousand dark missionaries, trained in all the crimes of sin and wrong-doing, to spread misery and moral and eternal death on every hand, without our ever putting out our hands as a nation to arrest or sweeten the stream of iniquity which has been floating by our doors for so long. Good Lord, wake us all up from our sleep of moral death into which we are falling, bound hand and foot by selfish interests—money, greed, sensual pleasures, and fascinating delights.

Gipsying in this country comes up before us in various forms, enough to send a cold, thrilling shudder through one’s nature. A friend whom I know well, in Leicester, told me only the other day that one of her distant relations at Greetham, in Rutlandshire, had SOLD, some year or so ago, his dark-eyed and dark-haired pretty girl of about twelve summers to a gang of gipsies for TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE AND A GALLON OF BEER, and the poor lost creature is now tramping and travelling the country, no one knows where. This poor girl’s mother is living in comfortable service in Leicester. One can hardly imagine a husband and wife, father and mother, so utterly lost to all natural feeling as to sell their child for half a crown; but so it is, and no doubt she is making money for the gipsy scoundrels and inhuman brutes. My heart often bleeds for the little lost gipsy girl, concerning whom slap-dash gipsy song-writers can call forth thrills of momentary pleasurable excitement from sensual gipsy admirers as they pass round the “loving cup.”

I often wonder what kind of song it is the poor child’s inhuman mother sings to while away the pleasurable duties of her station and the silent hours of the night; and while her offspring lies like a dog crouched on a heap of straw, half starved, dressed in rags, filth, and vermin, in some tent at the bottom of some dark lane by the side of a wood, listening with wide-open eyes to the screeching of game and weazels, the howling of the wind, and the beating of the hail and rain against her thin midnight shelter from stormy blasts.

While in Scotland a friend told me that recently he was in a hairdresser’s shop, and while he was undergoing shampooing and a scenting process, a poor, half-frozen, half-naked, Scotch gipsy girl, with dishevelled hair, came, with a small tin can in her hand, begging with tears in her eyes for some hot water. My friend was struck with the poor gipsy girl’s sorrowful, soul-mourning condition and request, and he asked her what she wanted the hot water for. “Please, my good gentleman,” said the girl, tremblingly, “my mother’s hair is frozen to the ground, and I want a little hot water to loosen it with. Mother can’t get up till it is loosened, and there is no one else in the tent to fetch the water and to get her up but me, sir.” What a tale of sorrow did the poor child relate. How sadly true is this of the gipsies and show people, and other travelling children all over our highly favoured and heavenly exalted country to-day. Our gipsies, by their own wrong-doings, lying, thieving, poaching, cheating, fortune-telling, idleness, profanity, sabbath-breaking, and other deadly sins, have bound themselves to the ground under our eyes, and we have stood by with our hands in our pockets, winking, blinking, and chuckling at their heartrending condition. Some thirty thousand gipsy children have, for the last three hundred and fifty years, received from door to door cuffs, kicks, crumbs, crusts, smiles, curses, and flattery, but have never, except in a flickering way, had extended to them the hand of practical help and sympathy. They have lived on our commons, in our lanes, by the side of our woods, in our dark, black alleys, in our prisons and workhouses. The little seedlings of hope that God has planted in the breasts of the poor gipsy children, we have, instead of encouraging them, trampled upon, and the little tender buds and blades as they peeped forth we have trodden down.